This drive may be damaged but the best way to recover drive space in this case is to debug the drive. You will still need to partition and format the drive after this process is complete but here is the site where you can find instructions on how to debug the drive.
It lets me put an extended partition and logical drives on the rest of the hard drive. Should it let me put a primary partition on the whole lot then? If i use my XP installation cd rather than fdisk it lets me create a partition for the full size and then format it but then just starts to install XP on its own but all i want to do is fully format it!
Ive had a play around with it and it recognises that there is 6150mb of free space but restricts the maximum primary partition size to 2047mb (33%) Why would this be so and what would happen to the rest? Has it just been sitting there as unpartitioned space all this time so i couldnt use it?
Windows 95 uses the FAT16 file system. The limit to the size of a partition in FAT16 is 2,147,123,200 bytes (~2GB). There is nothing you can do to change this so you will have to organize the hard disk into three 2GB partitions (C:\, D:\, and E:\). You can certainly use D:\ and E:\ just as you do C:\ so it is not wasted space.
Windows 95a was a FAT16 file system OS and thus was limited to 2 gigs as Denny says. Win 95B was capable of FAT32 and may be set up as FAT 16 or 32. The FAT 32 file system would allow larger drive access.
It is not clear in your original post if your system is currently running Win95 on your 6 gig drive. If you have Win95 running on it with the whole volume then you must be running FAT32 with Win95B. If this is the case your problem is probably the boot disk you are using being an older version? If so make a new boot disk. I prefer Win 98 with FDISK.exe also on the disk. When you run FDISK enable large disk and then set up your partition(s) and then format them. Otherwise you will have to use FDISK to chop up your drive into 3 or more FAT16 volumes.
LittleAdvice
1.1K Posts
0
October 28th, 2003 12:00
Gazmysta,
This drive may be damaged but the best way to recover drive space in this case is to debug the drive. You will still need to partition and format the drive after this process is complete but here is the site where you can find instructions on how to debug the drive.
http://support.dell.com/us/en/kb/document.asp?dn=1011054
Gazmysta
1 Rookie
•
59 Posts
0
October 28th, 2003 12:00
It lets me put an extended partition and logical drives on the rest of the hard drive. Should it let me put a primary partition on the whole lot then? If i use my XP installation cd rather than fdisk it lets me create a partition for the full size and then format it but then just starts to install XP on its own but all i want to do is fully format it!
Thanks
Gazmysta
1 Rookie
•
59 Posts
0
October 28th, 2003 13:00
Ive had a play around with it and it recognises that there is 6150mb of free space but restricts the maximum primary partition size to 2047mb (33%) Why would this be so and what would happen to the rest? Has it just been sitting there as unpartitioned space all this time so i couldnt use it?
Denny Denham
2 Intern
•
18.8K Posts
0
October 28th, 2003 14:00
Windows 95 uses the FAT16 file system. The limit to the size of a partition in FAT16 is 2,147,123,200 bytes (~2GB). There is nothing you can do to change this so you will have to organize the hard disk into three 2GB partitions (C:\, D:\, and E:\). You can certainly use D:\ and E:\ just as you do C:\ so it is not wasted space.
joat77
110 Posts
0
November 12th, 2003 22:00
Windows 95a was a FAT16 file system OS and thus was limited to 2 gigs as Denny says. Win 95B was capable of FAT32 and may be set up as FAT 16 or 32. The FAT 32 file system would allow larger drive access.
It is not clear in your original post if your system is currently running Win95 on your 6 gig drive. If you have Win95 running on it with the whole volume then you must be running FAT32 with Win95B. If this is the case your problem is probably the boot disk you are using being an older version? If so make a new boot disk. I prefer Win 98 with FDISK.exe also on the disk. When you run FDISK enable large disk and then set up your partition(s) and then format them. Otherwise you will have to use FDISK to chop up your drive into 3 or more FAT16 volumes.